I was going to try out Bitminter again, which I havent done for a long time - back when they first started, but after 20~ hours of hashing at 200GH/s - I had only 0.05BTC (almost all unconfirmed). Meanwhile here at slush I usually have at least 0.2BTC in that time span. The luck wasn't too bad at all during that time, so it wasn't that.

The luck is unfortunately very bad right now, after 96.73% and 74.41% CDF blocks we are now at 98.08% CDF with no block after 8 hours 48 minutes. Only 5 blocks in the last 24 hours. Add to that the fact that it takes about 10 hours from you do some work until that work is fully paid.. this is why the payout so far was low.

So I asked them what would cause this. There weren't any terribly long blocks happening on their end. The luck wasn't THAT bad. But my payouts were terribad. When asked, I was greeted by snark criticism rather than helpfulness and now insults to boot. Even after my question had been answered politely by someone nice enough. But never again.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I tried my best to explain about the variance and the work-to-payout delay, without any criticism. I think some miners got a little annoyed though.

I would definitely take this to an expert unless you are sure that you have done all that is humanly possible to recover those coins. Experts have special ways of getting data back, but there are obviously limits.

Unfortunately I'm one of those places where people go for light recovery jobs like formatted drives. I have 3 pieces of commercial applications to do recovery and have spent entire night using each of them with no avail. I recovered some of the older wallet files but nothing from the one I was looking for.

I do make several backups but my loss was because of a misunderstanding of the fact that if I create a new receiving address I have to make a new backup - that's exactly what I didn't do and proceed with format believing that I have a good backup

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/buildsRecuva is free and will scan the HD for lost files. however if u formatted the drive, it isnt going to find anything.formatted means formatted not quick format which isnt formatting its just a directory table wiping

I've used recuva before, it can bring back deleted files but never from a lost partition. Although I still used it as one of my last attempts after using 3 other apps - nope! All gone... today's value they were around 10k

I would definitely take this to an expert unless you are sure that you have done all that is humanly possible to recover those coins. Experts have special ways of getting data back, but there are obviously limits.

Unfortunately I'm one of those places where people go for light recovery jobs like formatted drives. I have 3 pieces of commercial applications to do recovery and have spent entire night using each of them with no avail. I recovered some of the older wallet files but nothing from the one I was looking for.

I do make several backups but my loss was because of a misunderstanding of the fact that if I create a new receiving address I have to make a new backup - that's exactly what I didn't do and proceed with format believing that I have a good backup

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/buildsRecuva is free and will scan the HD for lost files. however if u formatted the drive, it isnt going to find anything.formatted means formatted not quick format which isnt formatting its just a directory table wiping

I've used recuva before, it can bring back deleted files but never from a lost partition. Although I still used it as one of my last attempts after using 3 other apps - nope! All gone... today's value they were around 10k

Yeah Recuva isnt going to search beyond the present partitions. You could create a partition that spans the whole drive then search it.lifes about learning lessons... sometimes those lessons really hurt.

Yeah Recuva isnt going to search beyond the present partitions. You could create a partition that spans the whole drive then search it.lifes about learning lessons... sometimes those lessons really hurt.

Tough lesson learnt. However I blame my Lenovo Yoga for having such a small drive that my keys got overwritten pretty much instantly when I installed windows. It's just 256GB. Oh well!

Now I backed up my wallet and for practise wiped my laptop again, re-installed multibit and recovered a test wallet with small amount of btc. I had to do this practise because I don't want to lose anything ever again! My backup method works well.

Yeah Recuva isnt going to search beyond the present partitions. You could create a partition that spans the whole drive then search it.lifes about learning lessons... sometimes those lessons really hurt.

Tough lesson learnt. However I blame my Lenovo Yoga for having such a small drive that my keys got overwritten pretty much instantly when I installed windows. It's just 256GB. Oh well!

Now I backed up my wallet and for practise wiped my laptop again, re-installed multibit and recovered a test wallet with small amount of btc. I had to do this practise because I don't want to lose anything ever again! My backup method works well.

What could help in your case is using deterministic wallets. So you only need to back up once, then all addresses you create will be deterministic.I think Electrum supports this, don't know about Multibit.

Tough lesson learnt. However I blame my Lenovo Yoga for having such a small drive that my keys got overwritten pretty much instantly when I installed windows. It's just 256GB. Oh well!

You're blaming the digital size of a piece of hardware for your misuse which caused you to lose important data? Windows, on a bad day, takes 10gb. Most of my XP installs are between 600-700mb, and Windows 7 installs are 3-7 depending on how I slipstreamed it.

The size wasn't the issue.. your problem was you started writing data back to a drive instead of performing surgery to recover the data.

What could help in your case is using deterministic wallets. So you only need to back up once, then all addresses you create will be deterministic.I think Electrum supports this, don't know about Multibit.

I now created twice as many receive addresses than I need and will never create new ones. That's one sure way to know my backup will remain valid. I have also setup MS synctoy to create a backup with one click whenever I need straight to my file server's mapped drive which is running on RAID 5. Will never lose a single coin to my own stupidity.

You're blaming the digital size of a piece of hardware for your misuse which caused you to lose important data? Windows, on a bad day, takes 10gb. Most of my XP installs are between 600-700mb, and Windows 7 installs are 3-7 depending on how I slipstreamed it.

The size wasn't the issue.. your problem was you started writing data back to a drive instead of performing surgery to recover the data.

I'm not blaming the size per se, my problem was I only found out that my backup was bad after installing Windows 8 all over again and a bunch of software that I use daily including multibit. Problem with 256GB drive with Lenovo's oem stuff is that a chunk of it is backup/restore partition and stuff. So 256GB isn't really 256GB. My C Drive is 189GB formatted, Windows 8 takes approximately 30GB and all my software (plus documents etc) installed is typically about 80GB on its own. That's nearly 110GB almost immediately gone out of 189GB that I'm allowed to store on. With those odds, I pretty much overwrote my wallet before I even realized what I had done. So to blame anything is silly, I blame myself for my stupid action. People do stupid things but what makes me feel even worse is that I own an IT company Luckily my identity is safe or I'd lose business if people find out I did this to myself.

All in all, I'm no longer angry at the situation because I know for a fact that it is all gone and no way to get it back. I'm just moving on but I learnt a very important lesson which will prevent this from happening ever again.

Also, I have read the other day about a guy whose NAS lost a drive out of a RAID5 array and never notified him something was wrong. When the NAS lost another drive, his data was gone. So, you may want to test that your RAID failure notification is in working order.

Maybe an extra copy of the wallet on a CD-R? That reminds me to make a fresh one today.

I have 3 ASICminer blades on the way. I would like to mine with this pool.

I have a dedicated linux machine running ubuntu 12.4.

Ive already read quite a bit. but if there is any advice you can give on say power supply racking and cabling that would be awesome.

Aren't they just powered by USB? Plug and pray baby!

No! the ASICminer block erupters are USB. the Blades use ethernet. they connect to your LAN. You host a Stratum Proxy on your computer, hence why he has the ubuntu computer. Definitely not plug & play. there are other threads covering making these work.